Gender Pay Gap Essay

667 Words3 Pages

The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment posted a policy brief addressing the issue of the gender gap for wages. Women perform the same tasks as men in their job and get paid less money for it, with an 80-cent per dollar ratio of women to men. This gap is throughout every occupation, and every education level. There are three scenarios brought about to attempt to address this wage gap problem. The first scenario is to stop prohibiting workers from discussing pay, which brings about more awareness of how much everyone is getting paid, and tries to break away from pay secrecy, which is technically illegal. The second scenario is to not base employee pay on salary history, since when women have come from lower paying jobs from their successors before, that is what they would get after they discuss …show more content…

As shown in the lecture notes, this is primarily dealt through the gender socialization theory, where individual, over time, learn what is appropriate for their gender, and then go about having to follow the traits that correspond with their gender, which creates gender segregation. This additionally stems into gendered organization theory, where the ideas of what is appropriate or not for each gender definitely plays a part in how the jobs are assigned or distributed, as well as how much the worker is valued. In Schilt’s experiment, the conclusions were that men do receive workplace advantages compared to women due to the gender norms that surround men of authority and prestige, and how these beliefs have been used to make decisions about employment, promotions and rewards (Schilt) Based on the idea for many generations that men are superior than women for no apparent reason, this idea has unfortunately stuck and is shown within the